A Checklist For Business Websites - Part 3 - Metrics
This is the final article in a three-part series about the essentials of business websites. Part 1 focused on the importance of demographics and defining your target market for your business website. Part 2 explored the different business actions that should be associated with your site including automated actions, actions taken by your users, and your actions as a website owner. In this final part, the focus is on the various metrics that a business site should be tracking and what to do with the results.
If you haven't read the previous articles yet, I encourage you to read them first as this article will help solidify the concepts explained in the first two parts of this series.
Metrics
If your business isn’t measuring, you’re not trying to succeed. I realize that you may be putting long hours into your company, but many of those hours will be wasted if you’re not learning from your mistakes and improving your strengths. A business website should be like a scientific laboratory in which one experiment after another is performed, all with the goal of finding the perfect entrepreneurial combination.
Are You Documenting Your Process?
No experiment will have value unless you are able to repeat it. Whether your are doing external site promotion through social media, using contextual advertising, or are making changes in-site, you should be keeping track of your process, even if it is just a simple spreadsheet.
Are You Tracking Your Results?
As you document your process, you’ll also want to track the results of your efforts and you should be doing this in two ways: tracking your return-on-investment and tracking your visitors.
First, a word about return-on-investment (ROI). As you promote and improve your site, you should record the amount of time that each activity takes. When you later track your visitors, you should then be able to assign a monetary value to each activity that you performed. Doing so will allow you to objectively see which activities yield the most results.
If you find that some activities have very poor results for a high investment of time and/or money and you feel that sufficient time for testing has passed, eliminate that activity and concentrate on the activities with high ROI. Practicing this will act as an objective early warning system for your business and save you from sinking time and money into an activity that won’t see any reward. It’ll enable you to fail fast, recover, and concentrate on what really works.
In order to measure ROI, however, you’ll need to track your visitors and their actions on your site. Most hosting providers offer a web statistics package, but if you’d like additional insights into your website, Google Analytics is one of the most commonly used programs across the web and it’s even free. If Google Analytics doesn’t suit your needs, there are also a variety of other analytics and tracking software, both free and paid, that should do the task.
Once you’ve installed some method to track your results, the question becomes what should you track? Before answering that question, I first want to address what you shouldn’t be tracking.
Many business owners new to owning a website will find themselves wrapped up in tracking something called PageRank, which is a numerical value that Google assigns to web pages to determine, among other things, relevancy and authority. PageRank no longer has as much of an effect as it once did on where a page will appear on the search engine results page, however, as Google has since moved on to include more sophisticated ways of ordering their results. I would recommend that business owners don’t waste their time chasing PageRank and trying to increase it, especially since it only updates every quarter or so and the actual rankings can fluctuate hourly or even by the minute.
Another statistic that I need to make special mention of is your position in the search engine results pages for various keywords. While higher rankings usually mean higher amounts of traffic, more traffic doesn’t necessarily mean more money if your site converts poorly. Focusing solely on rankings or traffic to the exclusion of other, more important factors will only hurt your business in the long run.
"So what’s important, then? Ultimately, the revenue your business is making should be the line you’re trying to raise."
So what’s important, then? Ultimately, the revenue your business is making should be the line you’re trying to raise. Specific statistics will vary depending on the main business purpose of your website, but you will be looking for some sort of conversion. If you’re trying to generate leads, your conversion will be a successfully completed contact or quote form. If you have an ecommerce store, a conversion will consist of a completed sale.
Not all traffic will convert at the same rate, and so it’s important to segment it according to its origination point. Your analytics package should record the URL your traffic came from and if the visitor arrived at your site through a search engine, it should tell you what the search query was.
Ideally, you’ll want to funnel your visitors from the entrance page to a “money page” or a page that indicates the visitor has completed one of your primary or secondary actions. Google Analytics allows you to track (using anonymous data) the progress of visitors from one page to the next. This is generally referred to as your sales funnel.
You should also be looking at bounce rate, which will indicate the “stickyness” of your page by telling if the user went to another page on your site, or “bounced” back to where they came from. A lower bounce rate is better, but bounce rates can be deceiving depending on your content topic and where your traffic is coming from. If your content could be viewed as reference material, any visitors from search engines will probably quickly find what they’re looking for and then bounce back out. Social media sites are also notorious for delivering high bounce rates. Before worrying too much about a high bounce rate, examine the probable intent of the visitor and also the time they spent on the page.
Exit rate is similar to bounce rate, but it simply means the percentage of people that leave your site from a particular page. That page may or may not have been the entrance page of your site for that visitor, but it’ll indicate where in your sales funnel your visitor abandoned your site. If your bounce and exit rates are still suspiciously high after accounting for traffic intent and source, it may be a good indication that that page could be improved in some way.
Are You Testing And Improving?
The ultimate goal of tracking ROI and visitor behavior is improving your conversion rate and obtaining higher conversions in a more efficient manner. That means absolutely nothing unless you’re willing to take what you’ve learned and test new solutions in an effort to improve. Sadly, this is where many business website owners abandon their quest for success.
A successful business website should be viewed as constantly evolving, in a perpetual state of flux. If you’re not consistently documenting, tracking, testing, and improving, your business is leaving money on the table in terms of new conversions and efficiency lost.
Experiment with different variations of text, placement on the page, design, color, layout, and price. Google offers a free tool called Google Website Optimizer that will allow you to experiment with multiple variations of a single page, all at the same time. Test your most important pages first, then move on to some of the secondary pages, and then test them again with a new variation. Smaller website owners shouldn’t need to test every page, just the most important pages.
The key concept to remember with website testing is that it is a cycle. It shouldn’t end. In nature, when a plant stops growing, it withers and dies. You should view your business testing cycle in the same light.
It Takes A Lot To Succeed
What I’ve covered in this article only briefly covers some of the basic factors that go into making a successful business website. There are many other aspects should be considered after these fundamental issues have been addressed.
I understand that running a business website can be overwhelming at times, especially if you don’t have a technical background. If you would like help taking your website to the next level, we offer a comprehensive Website Analysis Report where we examine your business in over 100 different areas and make specific recommendations for improvement. If you don’t yet have a website, we also offer web development services based on the same principles shared in this article.
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